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PASADENA, Calif. When Caitriona Balfe headed for L.A. to become an actress she'd already spent 10 years as an international high fashion model. She had left home at 18, answering an invitation to Paris to shimmy down the runway. But her dream was to be an actress, and modeling proved an impediment. "You pick up a lot of bad habits in the modeling world in comparison to acting," she says in a noisy restaurant here, the sound reverberating off the etched glass walls. "Modeling is all about the 'poised' look, everything you do has to look a certain way. Whereas in acting you can't care about what you look like. It's all about what you feel or what...

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PASADENA, Calif. When Caitriona Balfe headed for L.A. to become an actress she'd already spent 10 years as an international high fashion model. She had left home at 18, answering an invitation to Paris to shimmy down the runway. But her dream was to...

LOS ANGELES � James who? That's the reaction many viewers had when CBS announced last September that James Corden would replace Craig Ferguson as the host of "The Late Late Show." Corden, who starts Monday, is a popular figure in...

Disney and Lucasfilm have announced details of the upcoming "Stars Wars" films at its annual shareholders meeting in San Francisco.
Rian Johnson has also been confirmed to write and direct Star Wars: Episode VIII, which will hit theaters May...

In 1966, when Leonard Nimoy was cast on a new science-fiction TV series called “Star Trek,” he was already 15 years deep into an acting career that had often appeared to be boldly going nowhere in particular.
For more than a decade he’d...

The 2014-15 TV season was already shaping up to be a watershed year for diversity on the major networks, thanks to the success of ABC's "black-ish" and "How to Get Away With Murder." The most-watched new comedy and new drama of the...

Nominees for this year's Academy Awards are set to be unveiled during a two-part news conference starting at 5:30 a.m. Pacific time Thursday and featuring directors Alfonso Cuaron and J.J. Abrams, actor Chris Pine, and academy President Cheryl...

James Franco is going back in time for the upcoming Hulu original series "11/22/63," based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King.
Franco will play high school English teacher Jake Epping, who discovers a way to travel back in time to...

If you want to meet Darth Vader and Chewbacca, hop on board a Disney cruise next year.
Disney Cruise Line announced Wednesday that it would host Boba Fett, Stormtroopers and other characters on board selected seven-night sailings in 2016.
It's a...

Disney and Lucasfilm have tapped Oscar-nominated actress Felicity Jones to star in the "Star Wars" standalone movie from director Gareth Edwards.
Jones was one of several actresses to have met for the role along with Rooney Mara and Tatiana...

The Force is with moviegoers.
"Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens" is the most anticipated movie of 2015, according to a Fandango survey.
The nation's largest movie ticket company said Tuesday that the upcoming franchise blockbuster...

Many wondered if Stephen Colbert, after playing a bloviating conservative for 1,447 episodes of his "Colbert Report," might finally break character and just speak as Stephen Colbert, human being, in Thursday's final episode. He did not.Spoiler...

"There has been an awakening. Have you felt it?" So asks the first teaser trailer, appropriately enough, for "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," director J.J. Abrams' highly anticipated update of the classic space-opera franchise.
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The Force is coming to theaters on Friday, with 30 locations rolling out an 88-second tease of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" in front of every film over the holiday weekend.
Lucasfilm and Disney will premiere the first trailer for...

Oscar Isaac is set for another violent year — this time in 2016. The 35-year-old actor will play the titular world-ending villain in "X-Men: Apocalypse," Fox's upcoming installment of the blockbuster franchise based on the Marvel Comics...

At 44, Simon Pegg thinks he's finally found happiness. The "Star Trek" and "Mission: Impossible" actor has that particular achievement on his mind recently, thanks to his new film, "Hector and the Search for Happiness." The...

Oscar-winning actress Lupita Nyong'o has been cast in the upcoming "Star Wars: Episode VII," Walt Disney Co's Lucasfilm said on Monday.
Nyong'o, whose first film role last year in "12 Years a Slave," earned her the Academy Award for...

For two years, Mark Hamill kept a secret he learned in Orlando.
"Star Wars" mastermind George Lucas had invited Hamill and Carrie Fisher to lunch and asked them to reprise their roles of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia in a planned...

When he was 13, Matt Reeves began directing homemade movies with a friend. The Los Angeles teenagers would collaborate on homages to the 1970s genre cinema all around them, making shorts that for Reeves included such childhood grandiosities as...

— In "Blue Is the Warmest Color," Adèle Exarchopoulos plays a French student who has an intensely passionate, excruciatingly painful relationship with an older woman (Léa Seydoux). Making the film, she says, was much the same.
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As 2013 winds to a close, we thought we'd take one more look back at the year's literary highlights. We asked Printers Row Journal contributors to write about a book they read this year that will linger in their minds well into 2014. Here's what they...